Alan Graham

SOCIAL ISSUES / RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY
Alan Graham (with Lauren Hall)
Welcome Homeless: One Man’s Journey of Discovering the Meaning of Home
Thomas Nelson
Paperback, 978-0-7180-8655-8, (also available as an e-book, an audio book, and on Audible), 240 pgs., $16.99
March 7, 2017

‘Notice it doesn’t say, “Feed the hungry, unless you think he might just have the munchies … Or, “Clothe the naked, unless he doth get drunk on Jack Daniel’s.”’

Alan Graham was struck by inspiration in show more 1998: food trucks. He envisioned a truck to feed Austin’s homeless where they live. Graham recruited five friends (the “six-pack”), and they pooled their money to buy an old catering truck. Inspired by God’s choice of Mary, an impoverished, uneducated peasant, and the example of Francis of Assisi, Graham understood that it’s about “communion through community, and community through connection,” and “bridging the gap between the divinity of God and dignity of man.” New, warm socks and a choice of Popsicle flavors are useful for this.

Some twenty-odd years later, Mobile Loaves & Fishes has served more than five million meals with the help of more than eighteen thousand volunteers. The mission has expanded to include (“Throw your fear away”) Street Retreats during which volunteers live on the streets with the homeless, micro-enterprises that allow the homeless to earn money with dignity, and the Community First! Village that includes not only housing but a grocery store, workshops, a clinic, a playground, and a dog park, among other amenities.

Welcome Homeless: One Man’s Journey of Discovering the Meaning of Home is Alan Graham’s spiritual memoir and autobiography, but more than that it is an explanation of “the gospel con carne,” and a demonstration of Mobile Loaves & Fishes’ philosophical cornerstone of community. Related in an engaging, colloquial style, and filled with gentle, good-natured humor (“It was like something out of a fairy tale, except instead of a Renaissance era king and queen, it was a badass Latino gangster and his wife”), Welcome Homeless is an inspiration and an exhortation to abandon our comfort zones and to attend not just to the passion, but to the compassion, of Jesus.

Believing human connections are meant to be “relational, not transactional,” Graham befriended the homeless men, women, and children on Austin’s streets, and it changed his life and his faith. “It allowed me to have the kind of faith that doesn’t ignore what’s underneath the overpass … behind the back alley … digging in the Dumpsters,” Graham writes. “It allowed me to know a God that doesn’t pretend what’s happening isn’t happening but, rather, is in the Dumpster too.”

Graham sprinkles facts and figures throughout his narrative, and quotes the Didache, C. S. Lewis, and Saint Augustine, but the bulk is comprised of the stories of people he has met. We go Dumpster-diving with J. P. Burris, meet Gordy the Gentle Giant and a transgender Navajo woman who earned a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Texas while living on the street, and follow the ups and downs of the love story of Brük and Robin. The photographic portraits of these individuals are a thoughtful inclusion.

In the introduction to Welcome Homeless, Graham states his goal for the book: He hopes ‘[we] will start to see the great “I AM” in the “least of these.”’ Mission accomplished, Mr. Graham. I laughed aloud, and I wiped away tears. I can’t imagine a better book for this Easter Sunday.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life. show less

1.5 rounded up because it (mostly) didn't make me regret learning how to read. I think it had a decent outline, besides failing to consider social media until 97% through the story (in my digital version which was obviously missing chunks early on).
I never bought in to the believability of the central relationship. I have no idea why they're together. All I got was mild grooming vibes every time the age gap came up, and remembering how the boyfriend fixed the devastatingly shy girlfriend's show more extreme touch aversion in a couple days. The kissing scenes were genuinely yucky. Not romantic at all. Incredibly incredibly awkward.
Overall this book did a lot of telling rather than showing and came across in places as the math professor's diary. I found numerous elements of it annoying, but the ending managed to avoid frustrating me, so it wins a little credit there. show less

Peter Campbell is a university lecturer in maths and Amy Carpenter is a secretary in the same department. Following a first-date, ‘thank you’ drink the pair become an item and the layers of Amy are peeled back to reveal her heart-breaking past, a French connection and beautiful singing voice.
For me, Who is Amy Carpenter is a tale of two halves. The speed at which events unfold and the heady pace of the developing relationship between Pete and Amy held my interest until around the halfway show more mark. Unfortunately, my interest began to wane as I continued towards the end. The simple style makes the book a really quick and easy read while the plot and characters have great potential. However, the repeated ums, erms, current language, almost cliched slang and prosaic, almost archaic vocabulary lumped together in almost every sentence, ending in an exclamation mark more often than not, killed any engagement for me and it all became a bit corny and clunky.
Unfortunately, Who is Amy Carpenter just wasn’t really my cup of tea! show less

One man, who was instrumental in beginning MOBILE LOAVES AND FISHES, a "soup kitchen" on wheels, interviews many homeless. He tells their stories and in some cases, their recovery to a more stable homelife. He tells what he has learned from them. Chapters can be read independent of each other, stand alone. Interesting and inspiring.